as pointed out by extremely and roberto you should use fork() to spawn a new job and send your email.
you should also close STDIN and redirect STDOUT and STDERR
a little example: 
#!/usr/bin/perl -wT
use strict; 
use CGI;
if(fork()) {
    my $q = new CGI;
    print $q->header();
    print $q->start_html();
    ## print your html here
    print $q->end_html;
}
else {
          close STDIN;
    open(STDOUT, ">>/tmp/yourscript.log") || die "Can't redirect stdou
+t";
    open(STDERR, ">&STDOUT") || die "Can't dup stdout";
    #you have to log warnings somewhere...
    select(STDERR); $| = 1;
    # so you can see what's appening with tail...
    select(STDOUT); $| = 1;
    #your email stuff here...
}

[download]
Update: Maybe you should also use a semaphore to prevent other istances of the script from running simultaneously...

In reply to Re: Getting Close and Cuddly with the sleep() function by cianoz
in thread Getting Close and Cuddly with the sleep() function by skazat

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